I have a line that reaches all the way across the page that I cannot delete even when my selection includes material spanning it. Advice that I found on google tells me to place the cursor above it and specify No Border in the paragraph group, but that did not remove it. It's presumably not from a stray footnote since it reaches all the way across the page while the lines just above footnotes do not. Nevertheless, when I'm positioned directly below it and press the Delete key it tells me that action is not permitted for footnotes. It's true I did have a footnote that would have appeared at that point, but I deleted it earlier. And if I look at the list of footnotes via References > Cross-reference > Footnotes, I see no blank items.



Thanks for your help.

If this is a footnote separator, you can delete it as follows: On the View tab, click Draft. Then click Show Notes on the References tab. In the footnotes pane, choose Footnote Separator in the drop down. Select and delete the content. You can do the same for Footnote Continuation Separator.

However, if you really deleted all the footnotes, you shouldn't see the footnote area at all. Are you sure that you selected the footnote reference in the main body of the document and deleted it properly?

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional